1. First of all, does anyone know how to minimize redirects? I am not sure how the problem came up along the way. I’ve watched a few tutorials and just followed them but perhaps I did something wrong. I am not sure how to get rid of redirects.

2. For Combine external JavaScript and Combine external CSS, I have downloaded the plugin WP Super Minify, WP Super Cache – Clear all cache, WP-Optimize, WP Smush etc. But it is weird that my site speed did not improve after downloading and using them all. Is it because some of them have overlapping functions? Which one should I deactivate to make it faster?

3. I have Godaddy for site hosting, but I read about CDN and cloudflare, is coundflare better than godaddy?
Thank you in advance for your help. I am still learning about everything and just can’t seem to get it even after reading many posts about improving site speed.

You can easily speed up your website by improving some aspects like CDN for photos and there is a free option in Jetpack which is called Photon ( Just install Jetpack and activate Photon ) GoDaddy already has server caching so nothing can be improved on that matter.

What can be checked as well is the number of photos that your theme creates since it happens very often that your theme creates large number of different photo sizes and you can easily remove few lines from the theme functions.php

There is also a cool plugin WP Smush which is optimizing photos and it would also increase the site’s load speed.

Each script file is like a mini program that your visitors need to download and process in order for your page to display.

Each of those script files needs to be parsed and processed. You have more than 40 of those. It takes time to process them.

Script files “hog” the browser. This means that they demand the browser’s full attention by default – unless they are marked as asynchronous.

“asynchronising” scripts is a fancy way of saying that you instruct browsers to load other elements on the page while they process the script file

So, what should you do about scripts?

The best practice is to use the least amount of scripts possible. Be aware of how many scripts the plugins / themes you use require. Not all code is created equally and sometimes you should just avoid bloated plugins / themes.

Once you’ve cut down on unnecessary script files, you should then proceed to combining what ever script files you ended up with.

This sounds fancy, I know, but it’s really nothing more than merging the contents of the separate scrip files into fewer file. There are plugins that can do that for you or you can do it manually, although the later requires a bit of knowledge to make sure things still work as intended.

After doing that, you need to make sure you either “async” the script file(s) that you end up with or make sure it loads after your content – near the bottom of the page

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2- You have too many CSS files.

CSS files are just files that contain information that tell the browser what to do with the content on the page. Things like how big the text should be or what color the header should be.

Treat them in the same way that you would treat script files I mentioned above.

Reduce any bloated stuff you don’t need, then optimize and combine what you have left at the end. Again, there are plugins that can do this for you or you can do it manually.

Much in the same way that script files “hog” the browser, CSS files also require full attention until they are fully downloaded

The difference is that you can’t “async” CSS files – you can put them at the bottom of the load order – near the footer – but that opens another can of worms.

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3- Too many requests.

This is an exaggerated analogy, but it drives the point home.

Imagine this,

You have a grand party and you want to order 100 pizzas, so you call the pizza shop. Now one of two things can happen.

A- you call / order pizza #1 / hang up / call again / order pizza #2 / hang up / call again / order pizza #3 / hang up / ……etc until you get to pizza #100

Or

B- you call / order 100 pizzas / hang up / done.

You can obviously tell that the later is a lot less trouble / much faster.

Your page has 99 separate requests. Each request is an item (can be a script file / or a css file / or an image / or a font file)

Your page is currently using method A from the analogy above.

The goal is to reduce the number of calls (or http requests) – More like method B

Reducing / combining your script files as I mentioned above will help cut down your requests. I should also note that you need to keep the number of fonts to the minimum. You don’t really need more than 1 – 2 fonts. Images can be combine using CSS sprites

After you do all of the above, you need to get familiar with caching

You are not serving cached pages.

When a user visits your a page on your website, your server has to “construct” it from all the different sections of your database / php files and that takes time.

meet Caching!

Caching is like a xerox machine. if you have a xerox machine, you can just make a copy of the document and serve it almost instantly.

Serving dynamic content without caching is literally like typing the whole document all over again – even if you already have the content memorized – every time it’s requested – it takes more time.

There are many great caching plugins.

Note: “WP Super Cache – Clear all cache” is not a caching plugin. IT only adds a function to the actual caching plugin “WP Super Cache”

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Now, CloudFlare

You can keep GoDaddy hosting and still use CloudFlare for free.

CloudFlare is a great service and I highly recommend it.

If you set it up correctly, your traffic goes through the CloudFlare network and your pages – which are cached by CloudFlare – are delivered to your users faster.

CloudFlare Cache works this way:

it only stores a cached copy of your content if it’s only been accessed from that CND Data Center before.

This means the same content from same Data Center location, anything else gets loaded directly from your server – and then it’s cached after that.

Even if you use cloudFlare, you still need a server-level cache solution – like a cache plugin.

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About those redirection chains:

The first redirection chain is caused by incorrect https redirects; just look for WordPress SSL redirect in google, there are many fixes.

Just to add, I have been using Godaddy hosting for quite some time now (over 10 years). It does a decent job but if you are looking for something faster, you might want to consider the costs of getting a wordpress optimized server (there are a few online if you just google).

It just takes away all the mundane work of backing up / worrying about cdn / caching etc.

@wpaleks Thank you. Photon is already active before I posted here. I installed WP Smush yesterday and already compressed all the files.@j09 Thank you for the reply. I did install WP Super Minify and activated it but I guess it is not working? I did want to use that to minimize all the CSS, Javascript etc.Good call on WP Super Cache, I didn’t know that there is actually a different one so thank you very much for it. I will also do the CDN thing today.
Actually, WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache is not available for installation saying this plugin is not allowed on our system, does anyone know why?@francisli Thank you for the reply! I will take it into consideration.